


you are (not) going to die alone

by exhaustedwerewolf



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: All maggots in this fic are strictly hypothetical, Angst and Tragedy, Asphyxiation, Bad Things Happen Bingo, But I'm gay, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, F/F, Hurt No Comfort, It doesn't really joss canon but it's still different to canon, Not Canon Compliant, One Shot, Pinned Down by Wreckage, Pseudo-Canon Divergence, Scene Rewrite, The Buried Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), The Hunt Fear Domain (The Magnus Archives), Tragedy, Unhappy Ending, and I wrote this for catharsis, kind of, literally burying your gays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27316582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exhaustedwerewolf/pseuds/exhaustedwerewolf
Summary: Basira's hand is forced, and Daisy's final few moments play out just a little differently.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	you are (not) going to die alone

**Author's Note:**

> title inspired by 'putting the dog to sleep' by the antlers, which is a great song if you want to cry about dasira  
> 

Daisy has brought the Everchase with her. Even in this domain, the Hunt’s influence has begun to steal into existence around them. Gnarled roots snake their tendrils around Basira’s ankles, and thorns catch at her clothes like teeth, and always within her, the rabbit-heart throb of breathless panic, red and raw as a pulsing wound. The shadows sculpting themselves into the silhouettes of monsters in her peripheral vision.

It’s true, what they say, Basira decides, setting her jaw. Forcing herself to focus on the monster in front of her. You can get used to anything.

Daisy herself is difficult to look at, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she’s difficult to comprehend. She is awful and awe-inspiring, more frightening than any mere beast of the imagination could possibly be. Daisy is more a surrealist spectre of primal predatory might than a single creature, a snarl of foaming fangs, thrashing talons, threshing telson, and countless bloodthirsty eyes. Before Basira stands, and stalks, and looms, monstrosity manifested, the hellish culmination of countless generations of terror passed through song and story and silent, secret dread, borne of that first pathetic animal’s futile instinct to flee the encroaching jaws of death. Of course, most of her is, at whatever passes for a given moment in this realm, human. What creature, real or imaginary, is so fiercely and obsessively devoted to the chase, so brutally successful at it?The Hunt owes most of the fear of it to humanity, and so Daisy bristles with sabre-tipped spears, brandishes a rifle with a barrel that gleams like fresh blood, and somewhere, amongst the evershifting infernal geometry of her, Basira catches the glister of that ensnaring smile. 

The gun in Basira’s trembling hands is empty. The casings gleam in the accumulating soil, useless relics. She’s missed every shot; of course she has. What was it Jon had said about this place? Dream logic, that was it. She’d wanted to laugh- no, obviously not _dream_ logic. After all she’s seen, that much is clear. The blunt and bloodied ache of a hundred thousand teeth ripped from your gums, one by agonising one, _ad infinitum_... Somehow watching every vivid moment of your insides torn out, hearing the squelch of maggots that worm their way through your body as it rots, feeling their every writhe. Wrenching round to run, only to find your limbs slow and sleep-heavy, as the hot breath of your pursuer ghosts your neck. Your hand shaking as you heft the gun, and _every_ shot missing, every miss echoing like callous laughter.

This place runs on _nightmare logic._

And as the forest continues impossibly to expand, the trunks of the trees enclosing them like the bars of a cage, the ground erupting into a crumbling ravine underfoot, Basira sees what she must do, and knows that she’s found the nightmare all her own.

Daisy turns the tapetum lucidum gleam of her predator gaze on Basira.

Her Daisy, who in another life, had made Basira rip off plasters for her, sometimes casually offering up an arm across the desk, sometimes swinging her leg up onto the rim of the little sink in her apartment, looking at her through the soap-scummed mirror. Always with that toothy grin, the endearing jut of her overlarge canines. 

“Come on,” She would say, and her voice was all her own. “I want it over with quick.”

Those words had echoed in Basira’s head when the world had gone wrong, when she’d clutched the gun in her hand until her knuckles had gone white, imagined looking down the barrel at her best friend.

Wrong again. Basira’s nightmare has found _her_. 

It’s easy to trigger the landslide. (Of course.) The ravine is merely set dressing, a backdrop for the climax of their inexorable tragedy- the soil crumbles like it was always meant to, like breakaway furniture. Daisy screams, a dissonant, animal sound, and the scream is cut short. 

It could still have been quick. In the waking world, maybe it would have been, hurried along by any number of merciful atrocities; Daisy’s skull could have been crushed, or she could have been knocked out, slept through her suffocation, or some vital organ could have been quickly and irreversibly mangled. 

In the nightmare, after the tide of crumbling earth, after the dust clears, Daisy’s wrist is pinned by rubble. Her hand isn’t limp but grasping blindly, like she’s reaching desperately for a coffin bell. 

“Ba...sira…” She rasps, and despite the discordant snarl that now passes for her voice, Basira hears the fear in it.

_Buried alive._

“I’m here,” Basira says, before she can stop herself.

Basira knows from the airless gurgle of Daisy’s voice that a rib has pierced her lungs, knows that she is going to drown, broken-boned and aching, beneath the earth. Perhaps she even _Knows_ this- perhaps it has been stuffed into her head like excelsior into an ugly, taxidermied corpse. Perhaps she always Knew, Knew the moment she decided a bullet through the brain would be the greatest mercy she could still bestow, Knew the moment that the Hunt erupted from beneath Daisy’s skin like a beast from the undergrowth, Knew the first time she pretended not to notice the little droplets of blood on the collar of her partner’s uniform. 

“Can’t… breathe…”

“Daisy-” Speaking the name chokes her, as if it’s her own mouth filling with dirt, as if the weight of it is splintering her bones right down to the marrow.

“Ba… sira?” The growl comes again, and it's only then that Basira realises that it’s not a response, that Daisy can’t hear her. “Partner…” Daisy’s voice warps into a choked gurgle.

_She’s all alone._

“Daisy,” Basira’s voice hitches, and before she can think, she is on her knees, clawing through the soil with her hands. “Daisy, can you hear me?”

_“Didn’t think it would end like this.” Basira remembers saying, and then, with a crazed sort of laugh. “Actually, I think I did.” It hadn’t mattered. Not with Daisy’s hand grasped in hers, not with her eyes just visible in the dim light. But then..._

“Daisy, answer me!” And in that moment, raking through the mud and debris with her own fingernails, blunt and human, she regrets it, with every cell in her bloodstream. “Daisy!”

_“Basira, promise me something.” Daisy had said, and Basira caught her breath._

Her own calls for Daisy twist into animal noises of grief. 

_“What- no. Daisy, no.”_

She is more herself than she has been in a hellish eternity, as the sobs bubble in her throat like bile.

_“Basira, when this is over, you need to find me.” Already, her breath is coming in shallow gasps, her eyes are rolling back. “And kill me. Promise me.”_

_“No. No, Daisy, we’ll figure something out,” She’d said, but Daisy was already letting go of her hand._

At last, her fingers graze something- not coarse fur or scarred scales, but something soft. 

_“These last months I…” She tries for that toothy smile- her lengthening fangs gleam in the dark. “It was always borrowed time... Can’t outrun it forever.”_

Memories sear Basira’s veins like paralytic venom; Daisy’s skin under her calloused fingertips, the groan of the station’s old radiator, the birthmark she brushed her lips to.

_“Daisy…” It came out desperate._

_“Promise me.”_

Unearthing her is like carving herself open. With every scrape of the soil, Basira dismantles her own carcass as she unearths Daisy’s. The first glimpse of blonde, and her joints are twisted out of her sockets. The plane of her cheek surfaces, caked in earth, and there is a tearing sensation, a sound in Basira’s head like the final crunch of bone.

_“I promise,” She’d lied._

**Author's Note:**

> this is a promptfill for 'pinned down by wreckage' as part of [@badthingshappenbingo](https://badthingshappenbingo.tumblr.com/)  
> it doesn't feel right to say hope you enjoyed this time, but hope you. felt. something? anyway, happy to talk over on tumblr as always and if you have any requests feel free to drop them in my ask! [@exhaustedwerewolf](https://exhaustedwerewolf.tumblr.com/)


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